Willard Sterling Boyle

Boyle, Willard Sterling, 1924–2011, Canadian-American solid-state physicist, b. Amherst, N.S., Canada, Ph.D. McGill Univ., Montreal, 1950. Boyle was a researcher at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., from 1950 until his retirement in 1979. He shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics with George Smith and Charles Kao. Boyle and Smith were awarded the prize for their invention of the charge-coupled device (CCD), an imaging semiconductor circuit that laid the foundation for digital photography and is also used in medical diagnostics equipment, imaging devices in modern telescopes, and video cameras. Boyle also worked on lasers and integrated circuits at Bell Laboratories, where he ended his career as executive director of research (1975–79).